Building a Better, Safer World What is the #1 Foreign Policy Challenge

By: Shawn
Published On: 7/27/2007 1:07:58 PM

What do you see as the next President's greatest foreign policy challenge that is not Iraq?  Was the basic question posed to a panel of journalists during a conference I attended sponsored by the Center for U.S. Global Engagement and the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign. 

According to Gerald Seib, the Washington Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal the answer is the United States relationship with the Islamic world.

Walter Pincus, the National Security Journalist for The Washington Post offered the opinion that the next administration needs to force a stop to seeing terrorism in everything and to stop reshaping our government and limiting our freedoms because of the threat of terrorists.

David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist for The New York Times put up the category of failed nation-states around the globe as the number one foreign policy challenge to be faced 

Another part of the conference has surrogates representing Democatic Presidential Campaigns the following is Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) for Barack Obama

READ MORE ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

Comments



Lots of problems for next administration to face (Ron1 - 7/28/2007 10:59:30 PM)
I don't know that I could narrow it down to one -- I think the general lawlessness of the current administration is far and away the most pressing concern, but I think in some respects we'll get *somewhat* of a pass on that from the rest of the world if the next President is a Democrat, which seems very likely at this point. But the rest of the world has seen six+ years of the uncomfortable show of the US actively acting to undermine and disregard treaties it at one point spearheaded composing and ratifying, so the next President needs to find a way to re-establish and strengthen the multilateral treaties that we've signed that are supposed to be bedrocks of our law once approved by the Senate.

Otherwise, I think that Brooks is somewhat right for once, in that failing states are a problem -- but the fact is that we are sadly often participants in these failing states (see Iraq and especially Somalia, where we've helped Ethiopia destroy the ruling government because they are/were "Islamist"). The bigger problem is in finding out how to combat non-state groups/actors that threaten international stability -- we need to use Constitutional methods to approach these threats, obviously with al Qaeda (the real ones in Pakistan) being at the forefront of those.

I'd also say that we need to have a leader that focuses on tamping down the fear that has driven much of our discourse since 9/11, as Pincus alluded to. Let's tell the truth about what really are threats to the world (nuclear weaponry may be, but "suitcase nukes" are more of a pipe dream; biological weapons are only threats if they are infectious and have long and infectious latencies, like smallpox, so let's focus on global public health and anti-flu initiatives; chemical weapons and anthrax are effectively conventional weapons) and then soberly figure out ways to confront those without using fear to lose our own ethos.

Finally, we need to step out of the conventional wisdom/elitist views of foreign policy and recognize that Saudi Arabia is more antithetical to our character than Iran, that propping up oil sheikhs makes our rhetoric of democracy and freedom a laughingstock in the Islamic and developing worlds, and that democracy can't be enforced at the end of a bayonet.